Processing temporal agreement in a tenseless language: an ERP study of Mandarin Chinese

Human languages are equipped with an impressive repertoire of time-encoding devices which vary significantly across different cultures. Previous research on temporal processing has focused on morphosyntactic processes in Indo-European languages. This study investigated the neural correlates of temporal processing in Mandarin Chinese, a language that is not morphologically marked for tense. In a sentence acceptability judgment task, we manipulated the agreement between semantically enriched temporal adverbs or a highly grammaticalized aspectual particle (-guo) and temporal noun phrases. Disagreement of both the temporal adverbs and the aspectual particle elicited a centro-parietal P600 effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) whereas only disagreeing temporal adverbs evoked an additional broadly distributed N400 effect. Moreover, a sustained negativity effect was observed on both the words following the critical ones and the last words in sentences with temporal disagreement. These results reveal both commonalities and differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages in temporal agreement processing. In particular, we demonstrate that temporal reference in Chinese relies on both lexical semantics and morphosyntactic processes and that the level of grammaticalization of linguistic devices representing similar temporal information is reflected in differential ERP responses.